Postdoc Neuroimaging in psychotic and affective disorders

The candidate will work on two projects, both involving adult patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, their first-degree relatives and controls. The first project is an imaging and cognition study of Positive Valence Systems (PVS) in psychotic syndromes, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH, USA). It involves two studies. First, to examine the PVS domain, and in particular reward circuits and behavior, we recruit a large genetically informative cohorts comprising 500 individuals (including 125 SCZ patients, 125 BP patients, 125 relatives and 125 controls). Using functional MRI (fMRI) we aim to characterize the neural correlates of the ventral striatum of the reward circuit during the Monetary Incentive Delay (MID) task in relation to diagnostic category and symptom dimensions. In addition, we aim to better understand the PVS system through online assessment of other PVS components (reward valuation, effort valuation, Action Selection/Decision Making using the Bandit task and the EEfRT). Second, we have set up an online study where we invite patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, their relatives and controls to perform the online tasks from home. For both studies, we currently build on two already existing cohorts in collaboration with the University Medical Centre Utrecht.

The candidate is responsible for supervision of two research assistants and a team of master students, METC handling, data management of the studies, and MRI processing and quality assessment.

The second project involves a study in the ENIGMA Relatives Working Group, also funded by the NIMH. In ENIGMA-Relatives more than 30 individual sites worldwide collaborate and contributed family cohort data (>6000 individuals). From its' start ENIGMA-Relatives took a cross-disorder approach, including first-degree relatives of patients with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. We now aim to expand this to also include first-degree relatives of patients with major depressive disorder. In this study, we set out to determine the relative impact of familial risk for severe mental illness on structural and functional brain metrics, with a focus on limbic and prefrontal brain regions. We collaborate with our colleagues at the University Medical Centre Utrecht, as their family cohorts are crucial to this effort.

The candidate is responsible for contacting all participating sites and recruiting new cohorts, assisting them in analyses of the imaging data and in running the (custom-made) statistical analysis scripts, and meta analyzing the summary statistics.